updated 12:24 pm EST, Thu December 12, 2013

Dropbox for Business to be offered to Dell enterprise customers

Dell has announced a number of new partnerships it has formed with other companies at its Dell World event in Austin today. The computer producer revealed updates to the Dell Cloud Partner Program, an agreement with Red Hat over OpenStack, and that it would start offering Dropbox for Business through its enterprise sales, among other announcements.

Dell's sales teams will be offering Dropbox for Business, the enterprise version of the popular cloud-based file storage and sharing service, to its enterprise customers in the future. Dropbox for Business will form part of Dell's Data Protection Solutions portfolio, alongside Dell's own cloud storage, with the Dropbox client set to be pre-installed on a number of Dell devices in the future.

As part of the Dell Cloud Partner Program, Dell will be working with Microsoft to offer the Windows Azure cloud platform to customers, expanding the previous work between the two companies in providing Windows Azure Application Development Services. A similar announcement sees Dell offering access to the Google Cloud Platform through the same Cloud Partner Program sometime next year, and another with Dell providing CenturyLink's own cloud product to customers. The agreements aim to help customers in creating their own cloud services, be they internal or public-facing, with Dell acting as a single-source supplier with centralized control and support.

Red Hat will be collaborating with Dell to work on "enterprise-grade, private cloud solutions" based on OpenStack, Red Hat's open-source platform. As well as becoming the first manufacturer to offer the Red Hat platform, Dell will work to contribute code towards OpenStack itself, collaborating on the fourth version of the platform, OpenStack Networking, and OpenStack Telemetry, which involves software-defined networking and service monitoring respectively. Dell will also become an Alliance Partner to the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, the highest tier of the program.

The company also revealed it would be creating a $300 million Strategic Innovation Venture Fund. The fund, building on top of the existing $60 million Fluid Data Storage Fund, will allow Dell to invest in start-ups and "early-to-growth-stage" companies in emerging technology areas such as storage, cloud computing, and security.